Day after day, the Mingling Legion under Li Chen's command grew at a visible pace, like a snowball rolling ever larger.
Once the Mingling Legion reached a certain size, taking it into battle again to hunt demons and harvest their cores became as easy as turning over his hand.
Li Chen led them across hundreds of li, wiping out one tribe after another, large and small.
The legion's numbers soon surpassed a hundred and continued to grow rapidly, reaching a hundred and fifty, then two hundred.
Li Chen had no ability to resurrect dead demons, nor could he precisely order those demons to leave survivors. Every battle required considerable effort to encircle the enemy before he could reap any gains.
Even so, the legion continued to grow by roughly three to five demons a day.
After all, his skill at refining the cores was becoming increasingly polished, and the demons themselves were hardly pampered creatures. As long as they had a breath left in them, they could recover in most cases.
Gradually, another month passed, and the number of Host Insects under Li Chen's control grew to as many as three hundred.
But at this point, Li Chen began to discover some new problems.
"The number of Host Insects I can control can hardly increase any further."
"The Potter Wasp Core can't control demons on a mental level. The slightest lapse in attention leads to stragglers, escapees, and even slaughter among themselves."
"Maintaining the group also requires vast amounts of resources and food. It's become difficult to find this many wild demons to hunt in the surrounding area."
Li Chen vaguely sensed that this problem probably could not be solved for the time being.
It was not that continued research would yield no results, but this was merely a minor